Widescreen: Five Emmy nominations to root for

The long trek to September's Emmy Awards honoring the past year's best television enters the home stretch at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, July 14, when the nominations will be announced during a live webcast at emmys.com.

All shows aired between June 1, 2015, and May 31, 2016, are eligible, though series with “hanging episodes” — episodes airing after the cutoff date, but from seasons within the window — could be considered without the benefit of the full voting period. (For example: Ballots were due June 27, just one day after HBO aired the finale of “Game of Thrones,” which may have gone unseen by voters.)

Between streaming series like “Orange is the New Black,” hard-to-define anthologies like “American Horror Story” and the sheer number of available shows, Emmy categories have expanded to include as many as seven nominees. It seems like anyone can get nominated now!

But it only seems that way. Here are five nominations I hope to see Thursday:

Kirsten Dunst, best actress in a limited series or movie, “Fargo.” There were showier actors on the tremendous second season of FX's crime anthology — Bokeem Woodbine and Nick Offerman among them — but Dunst's turn as the determined Peggy Blomquist quietly, gradually revealed itself as the show's tour de force. Heartbreaking and hilarious, Dunst made a hero out of a character who, in the first episode, drives home with a guy's corpse hanging out of her windshield.

Freddie Highmore, best actor in a drama series, “Bates Motel.”A&E's “Psycho” prequel series began three years ago in such disappointing fashion that I had completely written it off. Season 4, however, left me begging for more. Highmore bottles up Norman Bates' rage, then lets it out in tearful fury. He makes us both root for him and fear him. And he shows maturity as an actor beyond his 24 years.

Sterling K. Brown, best supporting actor in a limited series or movie, “The People vs. O.J. Simpson.” As Johnnie Cochran and Marcia Clark, Courtney B. Vance and Sarah Paulson had their Emmy nominations wrapped up the moment they appeared on screen. But Brown was given perhaps the toughest assignment on FX's landmark miniseries: Christopher Darden, the black prosecutor asked to help put a black American icon in prison forever. Brown brought levity, humility and dignity to Darden's defeat.

“Hannibal,” in any major category. NBC's re-imagining of Thomas Harris' Lecter novels should have stood tall over the traditional network landscape, but never managed more than a cult following. Showrunner Bryan Fuller, who has since beamed aboard CBS' 2017 “Star Trek” redux, deserves recognition along with Steve Lightfoot and Nick Antosca for writing the series finale (“The Wrath of the Lamb”), which both wrapped up the “Red Dragon” storyline from Harris' books and provided a fittingly ambiguous ending for Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) and his rival, Will Graham (Hugh Dancy).

Ramin Djawadi, best music composition for a series, “Game of Thrones.” The music on HBO's megahit has always impressed — the best for a series since Michael Giacchino's work on “Lost” — but Season 6 raised the bar. The haunting piano melody that begins the finale (“The Winds of Winter”) slowly builds into an unholy requiem for cello and choir and underscores the season's most daring, explosive act. Djawadi has come a long way from his guitar-heavy score for 2008's “Iron Man.”

• Sean Stangland is a Daily Herald multiplatform editor. You can follow him on Twitter at @SeanStanglandDH.